Experimental Intermedia Foundation, founded in 1968 by Elaine Summers, has been presenting performances since 1973. Produced and curated by composer Phill Niblock, over 1000 concerts have been given at his loft, and he has opened his doors to hundreds of composers, giving them a place to explore the use of new ideas and technologies in their music. As an offshoot of Experimental Intermedia, XI Records was formed in 1990, with the main purpose of presenting a series of compact discs highlighting the music of contemporary artist-composers whose works are original and galvanizing. The intent of XI is to extend the experience of these engaging and pioneering works beyond the performance space into the home. XI's catalog includes Phill Niblock, Elaine Radigue, Tom Johnson, David Behrman, David First, David Watson, Lois V. Vierk, Ellen Fullman, Philip Corner, Malcom Goldstein, Annea Lockwood, and many more.

Co-released with Umland Records, Germany. On one night in 2019, The Dorf (German for "village") took a heavy dose of the music of Phill Niblock. The impact on the musicians, gathering to play a double-length version of Niblock's "Baobab" and (in a second set) three "Dorf" tunes, was deep. It felt a bit like going to church -- a truly spiritual experience. At first, the audience did not believe the announcement that the "drone" piece would last for 46 minutes. Afterwards, their reactions showed the impression Phill's music had made on them. After a 20-minute break, three pieces followed -- a different game altogether, but connected to "Baobab" in the way that the energy and the feel for the evening had been thoroughly set by Mr. Niblock. Already his physical presence changed the reception for both musicians and listeners and the taste for this "wall of sound" was palpable. The Dorf (in itself already an orchestra of something like 25 people) had been augmented by friends to a total of 35 musicians -- almost too big to be true. In the second part of the evening, Katherine Liberovskaya projected along to the music some of her outstanding video work, which is obviously not documented on this album. Play the record at a not-too-soft volume and stick with it. One way or another, the music will get to you. Recorded live on September 19, 2019, domicil Dortmund Germany. Personnel: Moritz Anthes - trombone; Marvin Blamberg - drums, sampler; Julia Brüssel - violin; Simon Camatta - drums, sampler; Denis Cosmar - sound; Marie Daniels - vocals; Felix Fritsche - saxophone; Sebastian Gerhartz - saxophone; Christian Hammer - guitar; Florian Hartlieb - computer; Stefanie Heine - saxophone; David Heiss - trumpet; Volker Kamp - bass; Oona Kastner - synth, vocals; Jan Klare - saxophone, directing; Anja Kreysing - accordeon; Maika Küster - vocals; Katherine Liberovskaya - visuals; Raissa Mehner - guitar; Alexander Morsey - sousaphone; Johannes Nebel - bass; Fabian Neubauer - keyboards; Phill Niblock - composition; Kai Niggemann - Buchla; Adrian Prost - trombone; Gilda Razani - Theremin; Guido Schlösser - synth; Ludger Schmidt - cello; Hanna Schörken - vocals; Oliver Siegel - synth; Maria Trautmann - trombone; Luise Volkmann - saxophone; Martin Verborg - violin; Andreas Wahl - guitar; Florian Walter - saxophone; Max Wehner - trombone; Emily Wittbrodt - cello; Achim Zepezauer - electronics.

Cecilia Lopez's work is a perfect combination of flavors that slowly reveal themselves as you spend more time enjoying it. It has marvelous layers of sonic explorations that slowly unfold and draw you in. Red is more than a musical composition. It roots lie in its physicality. Nestled on a large cargo-like cable web are an array of small speakers and contact microphones. As this web sways the speakers and microphones come in and out of proximity and form an evolving feedback network, which slowly reveal themselves as a myriad of permutations accompanied by sympathetic synthesizer tones. Zero-input mixing works seem to be very popular now, but Red takes feedback further, beyond the electronic domain, by its use of a multi-faceted instrument creating a sonic architecture intertwined with the resonances of acoustical spaces. Her Machinic Fantasies, a kind of performed installation, explores another set of instruments she has constructed using two hand-rotated, 55-gallon drums each having a speaker inside with multiple cutouts that act as acoustical filters. Her sound materials, derived from field recordings to spoken word and live acoustic/electronic instruments, are fed into the oil drums and emanate through the holes and are at the same time amplified using microphones placed near the rotating holes. Driven by a detailed score, this recording resulted from a music commission at Roulette in Brooklyn, New York combining the two rotating drum instruments with instrumentalists Jean Carla Rodea, Julia Santoli, Christopher McIntyre, and Joe Moffett. Machinic Fantasies also has multiple dimensions with the resonances of the performance space excited by the instruments, the musicians weaving their sounds into the space from different locations, and the ongoing physical rotations of the spinning drums to create a swirling almost hypnotic music.

XI Records releases Drop By Drop, Suddenly, a two-CD set of eleven compositions for bassoon composed and performed by Leslie Ross. Ross is not only an internationally renowned instrument builder but is also an uncompromising creative musician. The first disc starts with a series of short seed pieces that play primarily with the timbral and microtonal differences highlighted between tone-holes, forming a layered effect while playing with only one fingering, single note or multiphonic. They range from the strictly tonal or modal pitch-centered to a thicker atonal and dissonant collection of frequencies. Pieces progress to longer complex ones by the second disc, some of which have as minimal material as the shorter ones, but make more extensive use of live multi-track recordings and frequency filters to further bring out changes in frequencies or accentuate specific multiphonics. The electronics used were created explicitly for each composition using the computer-based program MAX/MSP. Save for the unconventional 15 microphones of the "prepared bassoon", these recordings include pieces with no sound processing whatsoever, as well as pieces that do involve sound processing and multi-tracking. Importantly, however, any processing is made in real time, not post-recording. All recordings are single-take recordings where four speaker channels along with room microphones have been mixed down to stereo. Key clicks occasionally get picked up in a loop recording to return sometimes processed, sometimes not, while in circular breathing a multiphonic might drop out before sounding again. What might sound like clicks or occasional drop outs on some pieces are not overlooked mastering faults but the result of this live processing, presenting these pieces as they would be in performance. With a formal background in classical music and early performance practice, Leslie Ross took a plunge into the free improvisation scene of downtown New York in the mid 1980's and has immersed herself in experimental music ever since. Her connected, parallel, work as a baroque bassoon builder also opened up concurrently into explorations of invented instruments and sound installations. She has presented solo programs, both acoustic and electro-acoustic throughout Europe and the US over the past three decades. In the mid 2000's she returned her music focus to a detailed exploration, analysis and understanding of bassoon multiphonics. It is through this exploration of multiphonics and the subtle changes made when playing with resonance keys that brought her to the music presented on Drop By Drop, Suddenly.

Electroacoustic Works collects three major pieces from the early 21st century New York-based composer Dan Joseph. This double CD release includes Set Of Four, a group of fixed-media sound collages using the processed hammer dulcimer as the primary sound source, two live performances of Dulcimer Flight for electroacoustic hammer dulcimer, and a 64-minute version of Periodicity Piece #6, a mixed-media work that originated as a multi-channel sound installation. With roots in early minimalism, ambient music, and acoustic ecology, the works herein represent a significant subset of the composer's larger body of work from the past twenty years that he has developed alongside an active career as a composer of instrumental chamber music. Dan Joseph began his career as a drummer in the punk scene of his native Washington, DC. During the late 1980s, he was active in the experimental tape music underground. He spent the '90s in California where he studied at CalArts and Mills College. His principal teachers include Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, Mel Powell, and Terry Riley. Since the late 1990s, the hammer dulcimer has been the primary vehicle for his music.

From the liner notes by Alan Licht: "What's striking about Dan Joseph's music is that it's drone oriented but also mindful of timekeeping. This would seem to be a paradox: most drone-based music and/or classic minimalism often reaches for a feeling of cosmic timelessness, or a sense of perpetuity via repetition, but the pieces on these discs all demarcate time in some way . . . Duration, another minimalist conceptual hallmark, is a means to an end rather than an end in itself for Joseph: the combination of simple harmonic material and extended lengths of time allows for more activity that is readily perceived, rather than to set up a near-static hypnotic state that is only occasionally jostled by a subtle shift in the music . . . In the computer age, digital memory and storage capacity are crucial technological attributes and an everyday concern; Dan's electroacoustic pieces set up their own kind of memory banks for both the performer and the listener. The musical information is being supplied to and retrieved from both electronic and mental repository systems. This is post-minimal music where repetition is a mnemonic device, rather than a tool for trance or head-clearing."

Ulrich Krieger's /RAW:ReSpace/ is the first ever experimental noise-metal saxophone solo album, changing and redefining how the saxophone can sound and what saxophone playing means. No saxophone player has ever dared to explore these uncharted outer realms of woodwind expression. RAW brings together noisescapes, electronica, death- and doom-metal approaches, and contemporary instrumental composition techniques, while ReSpace combines soundscapes of dark ambience and controlled feedback with a reductionist approach to create eerie ambient sound-fields. All sounds are saxophone-produced and performed live, with no sampling and no purely electronic sounds. RAW and ReSpace are part of the ongoing Universe series. Krieger is well known as a saxophone player in the worlds of rock, noise, contemporary composition, and free improvised music, and as a composer of chamber music and electronic music. He has been active in pushing the boundaries of saxophone playing in general and the function of the saxophone in rock and noise in particular, collaborating with Lou Reed (Metal Machine Trio, Lou Reed Band), Lee Ranaldo (Text of Light), Faust, and Zbigniew Karkowski, in addition to leading his own death-doom-noise-metal band Blood Oath. His original compositions vacillate between just intonation, silent music, noise, and instrumental electronic, often asking for elaborate amplification, and exist in the abysses of rock culture, refusing to accept stylistic boundaries. In his distinct style of amplified saxophone playing, Krieger processes refined acoustic and quasi-electronic sounds, using his saxophone more as an analog sampler than a traditional finger-virtuoso instrument. By amplifying his instrument in various ways, he gets down to the grains of the sounds, changing their identities and structures from within. Ulrich Krieger: electric tenor saxophone, saxophone-controlled feedback, pedals, delays, ¼-inch jack cable, vocals; Joshua Carro: drums (CD 1 tracks 3 and 5). In his liner notes, Ivar Bjørnson of Enslaved writes, "When Ulrich introduced his 'acoustic electronic' concept, there was another door blown wide open, and another glorious field of pure expression revealed. There is an openness, and a level of abstraction to the music that leaves room for 'me' to exist within the music; I can bring my own associations, patterns and inner visuals -- and let it blend, mutate and morph into the intended delivery from the artist. The acoustic element in Ulrich's music makes the sonic reality deeper, as the organic qualities of acoustic-to-electronic resonate with the mind and flesh in a way electronic-to-electronic cannot."

1995 release. Logos Works contains eight works by the Logos Duo featuring both Moniek Darge and Godfried-Willem Raes on various instruments, as well as other performers on a wide range of instruments. "This latest recording comes as they look back upon 25 years of collaboration as the Logos Duo. More than a retrospective, we see them affirming a long artistic relationship and forging new horizons -- together and on divergent musical paths. In this, their work is a metaphorical journey: an inward exploration of the elegance of algorithmic composition and a voyage out into distant soundscapes. This CD from Godfried-Willem Raes and Moniek Darge is both a literal and figurative journey; in sound and music we have the Yin­Yang energy that is the Logos Duo. Enjoy listening!" --Douglas Quin

2003 release. Two CDs for the price of one. Alan Licht wears many hats. Over the years, he's been a curator of music as well as a tireless performer. And he's as well-known an author as he is a musician. It's one thing to have eclectic tastes; it's another to make a practice of them. While Licht's earlier records have seamlessly melded his improvisational guitar playing with extended plundered sounds, A New York Minute takes things a few steps further. Instead of fusing the many sides of Licht into one monolithic mega-mix, this disc separates them into discrete compositions. There's a lot more at stake here: the guitar pieces are showcased as guitar pieces and the plundered works are just that. The conceptual tendencies in Licht no longer hide behind his talent as a guitarist; likewise, the guitar pieces are no longer propped on hooky concepts that take our attention away from his fretwork. The good news is that both work: Licht is as strong a conceptual artist as he is a composer.

1995 release. Allison Cameron's compositions can be characterized as rigorous forms within which specific sound worlds are explored. She experiments with the physicality of sound on various instruments, using pithy material to exploit instrumental colors. Most of her works to date have been written for a variety of chamber ensembles encompassing both traditional and unusual groups of instruments. "Cameron takes her ideas and plunges them into darkness. There is nothing objective in this approach. Cameron's music has something to hide. By highlighting only a few musical features while restricting all others, Cameron puts a tiny corner of the musical world into very fine focus. It is like illuminating the universe with a pen-light. Compare this to the barely contained brutality of 'A Blank Sheet of Metal.' This piece is never quiet -- its soft moments are full of the tension of loud, powerful, angry arguments being forcibly held back. The restraint is deafening: those moments when the tension erupts or the loopy melody at the end can't clear the ominous air. It is a dark and unclean ritual, a terrifying vision of the world. Allison Cameron's great strength is that she has lifted that lid -- slightly, not enough to let the terrifying mixture spill out, but just enough to give a sense of the darkness, the dirt, and the raw, crude power of real life." --David Lang

1998 release. "This is not an album of environmental sound for relaxation, though listening to it might have a calming effect. Nor is it sonic nostalgia for a tame or even cute nature. Some of these sounds (especially if played loudly on speakers with good bass response) can bite!" --Warren Burt. "World Rhythms" originated as a ten-channel live improvisation in which the audience was surrounded by ten loudspeakers. The recorded sounds include volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, radio waves, geysers and pools, and tree frogs. These sounds are a physical manifestation of energies which shape us and our environment constantly, energies of which we are not always aware, but which powerfully influence and interact with the rhythms of our bodies. "i come out of your sleep" follows a tradition of sound poetry, or text-sound, begun in part by Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate and expanded by composers such as John Cage, Charles Amirkhanian, and Jackson Mac Low. The piece is based on the speech vowels in Louise Bogan's poem, "Little Lobelia." The vowels are whispered and elongated; their shapes become breathed melodic arcs and tones, and that breathing becomes the core of a stylized meditation.

2011 release. Charlie Morrow (b. 1942) is a sound artist, composer, sound poet, event maker. Charlie Morrow is a conceptualist whose music- and sound-work explores many styles and forms, from events for media and public spaces to commercial soundtracks, new media productions, museum installations and programming for broadcast and festivals. Assembling expert project groups, Morrow employs a collaborative style that fuses arts, artists, and environment. Charlie Morrow, for an artist who has been making music for over 50 years, has been vastly underrepresented on recordings. This three-CD retrospective set attempts to rectify that situation to some degree. The 15 works on these discs span the years from 1957-2007 and include: Morrow's first major work, Very Slow Gabrieli, a super slow motion performance of G. Gabrieli's Sonata Pian e Forte for double brass ensemble; Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves, a beautiful polychromatic, almost tactile collage where chattering sparrows and mellifluous songbirds join the measured undulations of devotional voices. Brass rings out over cradles of bells, doves coo, gulls mew and the wash of the tide ushers in the late medieval intricacies of dulcimer, recorder and viol. You can experience the sound made by herds of instruments through the two instances of Wave Music included in this set. As well as environmental works, chanting pieces, audio collages, and so much more.

1993 release. Daniel Goode's Clarinet Songs has long been a favorite on the new music concert circuit. It is a 75-minute suite for solo clarinet which Goode began writing for himself in 1979, and reached its current form in 1991. It uses all of Goode's virtuosic techniques distilled into sixteen "Songs without Words," a poetics of the new clarinet. It is made up of a series of individual pieces, each a sound world of its own, based on some unique material, perhaps a specific technical, poetic, or sonic idea, or some synthesis of these. Most use circular breathing for continuity and use alternate fingerings which produce non-tempered intervals with unusual, striking timbres.

2005 release. Two CDs for the price of one. David Behrman has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as musical compositions. Sam Behrman and Siegfried Sassoon met in 1920, when Behrman, then a young writer working at The New York Times, was sent to interview Sassoon at the start of the English poet's postwar American lecture tour. In that tour Sassoon was billed as "England's Soldier-Poet." He had a reputation both as a war hero and an anti-war poet and peace activist. Many years later, each author wrote about this youthful meeting, which inaugurated a long-lasting friendship and a correspondence, mostly conducted via trans-Atlantic letters between England and America, which continued into the 1950s. My Dear Siegfried provides a performance environment in which musicians interact with texts by the two authors and with music software designed to respond to the performers' actions. The texts and the software elements are arranged as a linear thread along which the piece progresses. In QSRL (1998) a sensor listens to what the performer is doing and a computer music system provides responses to information the sensor takes in. Viewfinder (2002) is a sound installation using software based on homemade synthesizer music of the early 1970s. In A New Team Takes Over (1969), homemade synthesizer modules were used in this piece to distort recordings made off the air of press conferences by members of the new Nixon administration following the American election of 1968. Touch Tones (1979), from the early days of music done with the help of newly-available, small, inexpensive "microcomputers," made use of a kind of primitive artificial intelligence scheme. Pools of Phase Locked Loops (1972) was one of four pieces made in response to commissions to the artists of the Sonic Arts Union (Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and Behrman). The recording is from a live performance at Radio Bremen in May 1972.

1991 release. Unforeseen Events is one of many pieces David Behrman has made with computer software designed to interact in real time with a solo performer. The four sections recorded here were made specifically with Ben Neill's performance style in mind. The electronic timbres are intended to complement the sounds of his instrument, the admirable and humorous mutantrumpet, with its three separately-mutable and playable bells. Refractive Light consists of three small pieces based on an interweaving and overlapping of simple phrases. A musician strikes pitches that trigger responses in the form of sustained tones. The tones die out after a few seconds. While a tone is on it deflects the pitches of other "on" tones, so that harmonic changes occur at the on-and-off edges of overlappping layers. The idea can give rise to a kind of fanning or breathing rhythm that adapts itself to different styles of playing, and to a harmonic vocabulary with dozens or scores of family members.

2010 release. Long overdue overview of composer David First's drone works. Featuring Chris McIntyre and Peter Zummo, trombones; "Blue" Gene Tyranny, keyboards; and The Black Jackets Ensemble. "This was something unexpected and truly different: pulsing electronic textures that derived their rhythm from the beating patterns of closely-tune pitches -- as if Alvin Lucier and Philip Glass had gone on a blind date to CBGBs... David put the beat in beating patterns" --from the liner notes by composer Nic Collins (on his initial exposure to First's music in 1987). This special and specially priced set (three CDs for the price of two) contains nine works composed between 1996 and 2009. "1996 was the beginning of a new period for me," says First. "I had spent the prior five or six years creating a lot of music for other players and larger ensembles -- culminating in 1995 with a couple of mountings of my opera, The Manhattan Book of the Dead. I was a little burned out on this and decided to return to a more personal, intimate format -- one that ended up including an even more extensive exploration of tunings, alternative compositional softwares and how my playing techniques interacted with these things. I think I just wanted to go deeper and have more control over the results. During the ensuing years I've had a few pendulum swings -- forays into beat-oriented pop music with lyrics and vocals and, of course, the re-animation of my rock band from the late 70s -- The Notekillers. But I've continued, through all of the changes, to maintain my grounding in my love of the drone and associated acoustical phenomena -- a love affair that began in my teenage psychedelic years and will, no doubt, be a most significant aspect of my music path for as long as I am at it. The tracks here represent almost every major work created from 1996 to the present and I'm grateful that they will be heard by a wider swath of people than those who lived in NYC or happened to be at one of my touring performances during these years."

2007 release. Two CDs for the price of one. "Fingering an Idea (a phrase pulled from a Chris Mann piece) resulted from a Phill Niblock invitation to make a double CD for bagpipe and guitar. A bagpipe CD is a particular challenge. A high beam spatial explorer, it is the kind of unstable phenomena that is hard to enjoyably reproduce on your stereo player. The first pipe recording session was an ensemble piece, the score including walks around the concert hall. The second, a solo multi-track session. The third with Rob Ramirez, recorded material was played back in the concert hall through an eight-channel MSP patch. A carnival of colliding pans, exits and entrances, re-recorded for stereo. For 'Sinister,' an old cassette recorded at Amica Bunker was the original germ. A sequence of re-tuning and de-stringing, starting with six strings pitched across a whole-tone and ending with an improvisation on one string. This old piece was dusted off and reworked through an image of bell-ringing, another outdoors vernacular." --David Watson

2019 restock; 1998 release. Voted one of 1998's top 15 Records of the Year in Modern Composition by the writers and critics of The Wire, Trilogie de la Mort is a work in three parts for anolog Arp synthesizer. The first third of the work, Kyema, is inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead and invokes the six intermediate states that constitute the existential continuity of the being. Kailasha, the second chapter, is structured on an imaginary pilgrimage around Mt. Kailash, one of the most sacred mountains in the Himalayas. Koumé makes up the last part of the trilogy and emphasizes the transcendence of death.

2000 release. From the liner notes by Tim Perkis: "Ellen Band's work... lies in the path it takes, leading one from listening to recordings of natural sounds to, before one knows it, being immersed in a dense and complex field of sound which, though built completely from natural elements, is something quite transcendent and otherworldly. Band's music seduces us into perceiving the sensuous properties of familiar sounds by building dense and complex sound environments out of these elements. By sheer sensory density we are brought face-to-face with the physical, vibrational reality of sounds, bringing us to a state of attention to what we perhaps have lazily ignored through over-familiarity. The ever-active yet somehow static nature of some of these pieces, as they reach very rich sonic densities, start opening like rich noise sources, providing a field for auditory illusion and hallucination. It's as if our perceptual apparatus, brought to a high state of awareness by the odd combination of familiarity and extreme density, begins providing its own guesses about the meaning of it all -- aural hallucinations." From the liner notes by Brenda Hutchinson: "At the end of each of Ellen Band's pieces, we return to the 'real world' as it was heard in the beginning. The sounds are now full of memories with the residue of where they have been. It's hard to hear a simple, familiar sound again without imagining what its 'other life' is like."

1993 release. Body Music is music for Ellen Fullman's unique Long String Instrument, an 80-foot long instrument with approximately 80 strings. Fullman has long been developing this instrument for longitudinally vibrating long strings. Having received a BFA in sculpture, her interest in music began with the resonance of materials used in making sculpture. When she started making the Long String Instrument, she saw it as "sculpture as music"; now she has come full circle in conceiving "music as sculpture." For the most part, the music in Body Music relies harmonically on the diatonic scale. Because of the prominence of overtone content, more complex harmony is suggested. Through her studies of extended harmony, Fullman has come to realize that harmony is "dimensional."

1995 release. Fast Forward is a composer and performer best known for his compositions for percussion, and music theater works for diverse instrumentation. His compositions push the juxtapositions of structured rhythms and total chaos to their limit, delivering a sonically dense and theatrically gripping performance. Same Same is a collection of live recordings from three concerts that took place in New York City during the period 1990-1994, with Takehisa Kosugi, David Moss, Ben Neill, Ikue Mori, David Shea, James Lo, Yuval Gabay, Guy Klucevsek, Michelle Kinney, Alex Tobias.

2002 release. Two CDs for the price of one. These two discs represent some of Gen Ken Montgomery's sound art and compositional work from 1981-2001. Pondfloorsample is a collection of sonic explorations utilizing common devices meant to hold something other than sound. As with much of his sound work, the sonic material contains many sounds of everyday life. Having composed extensively for multi-channels, Pondfloorsample was specifically designed as a stereo audio piece enabling Montgomery to reach a larger audience. His work always begins with listening to the world. He works within processes, defining a set of conditions by which a piece will unfold itself. Sometimes he takes the familiar -- sounds of icebreakers, radiators, laminators, egg slicers, bath drains, etc. -- amplifying their familiarity, all the time asking us to hear the world a little differently. Other times he constructs a vapor of mesmerizing sound that is entirely disassociated with things that you know or instruments that can be visualized. These are sounds that you can see. He has a Cageian appreciation of ambient noise.

1991 release. Guy Klucevsek is teaching the accordion to whoop and wheeze in strange new ways. Once condemned to drunken requests for "Who Stole the Kishka" and "The Happy Wanderer," this virtuoso now plays deconstructed, reconstructed art songs and dance tunes, translated into a metalanguage of his own making. His is a musical Esperanto fashioned from hocketed melodies, giddy with arabesques; Henry Cowell-style tone clusters; the eerie difference tones of "acoustic phenomena" composer Pauline Oliveros; the hypnotic phasing and locomotive ostinatos of early minimalism; low-register drones punctuated by high-register yips, in a manner reminiscent of Scottish bagpipe and Bulgarian accordion music; dark, György Ligeti-ish sound clouds, lit from within by lightning-like melodic flickerings; the metric modulations of Elliot Carter; a Morton Feldmanesque sense of grand gestures, and of microscopic movements; an appropriation aesthetic shared with John Zorn and other New York avant-gardists; and a rollicking, roisterous energy borrowed from dance forms and folk music the world over. In Flying Vegetables of the Apocalypse, Klucevsek gives us a postmodern conundrum: dance music informed by avant-garde styles designed to be listened to in a straight-backed chair, wearing starched duds and too-tight shoes; art music enlivened by dance musics best appreciated while slipping and sliding over sweat-slick floors. It is, refreshingly, a holistic postmodernism rather than an explosion in the Toontown sound-effects department. The identities of the Slavic, South American, and American idioms from which the composer draws inspiration are preserved, while the twentieth century classicism that is his anchor remains unshakable. Ensemble pieces for strings, percussion, guitars, and woodwinds on Flying Vegetables of the Apocalypse feature Bobby Previte, Tom Cora, David Hofstra, John King, Laura Seaton, and more.

1993 release. Open Secrets features Mac Low and Anne Tardos performing works for multi-track voices; and Robert Bethea, Andrew Bolotowsky, Daniel Goode, and Gabriela Klassen performing instrumental pieces. "Winds/Instruments" for flute, clarinet, trombone, violin, and narrator could well become a classic of new music, not only being beautiful, but also displaying Mac Low's witty use and love of words. Jackson Mac Low was first published in 1942. His multi-faceted career covers music, poetry, painting, performance, radio, and multimedia. Widely recognized for his work in the 1960's Fluxus movement, Mac Low has continued to produce musical works that meld aspects of several disciplines. In 1954 he adopted nonintentional procedures, including chance operations, indeterminancy, and related methods, but has also written and composed extensively by intentional methods. His many "simultaneities" include musical, verbal, and visual elements, usually involving guided improvisation and indeterminancy.

1990 release. Lois V Vierk creates music with a distinctiveness that flows from a mixture of the intense analytical disciplines of her composition teacher Leonard Stein, and the gentle admonitions of her Japanese Court Music teacher Suenobu Togi to "just do it." The influences of Vierk's long study of Gagaku (the Imperial Court Music of Japan) do not show on the surface. Rather they are heard in knowing that what has happened and what will happen are part of a sure path toward fulfillment. Gagaku unfolds with ceremonious slowness. Time seems to be suspended before the taiko drum sounds its next musical heartbeat. But the drum does sound, and when it does, it divides the music that has just passed and that which is to follow, all part of an elegant musical order. The elegance and order of Vierk's music, like Gagaku, touch the heart of the person who listens, who takes time, who is open. On Simoom we hear three of Vierk's works for "big instruments," that is, multiples of the same instrument, treated more like single entities than like groups of voices: "Go Guitars" for five electric guitars tuned microtonally around "E," "Cirrus" for six trumpets, and "Simoom" for eight cellos. All three works employ what Vierk describes as "Exponential Structure," which utilizes exponential relationships to control time, pitch movement and rates of change. Within this system, Vierk creates very directional compositions possessing high energy. As in Gagaku, they unfold slowly. Although clearly building on the work of minimalist composers, Vierk's music is much more concerned with constant development and climax. This disc offers virtuoso performances by David Seidel, electric guitar; Gary Trosclair, trumpet; and Theodore Mook, cello.

1998 release. The Seasons: Vermont is a soundscape of Vermont as charted through the changes of its yearly soundings. It is a composition in four parts (Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring) for magnetic tape collage with an unspecified live instrumental/vocal ensemble. Though the actual composing of the music was completed between 1980 and 1982, it is the realization of a ten-year composition project. Goldstein listened closely and became attuned to what was the particular sound quality of each season in Vermont. He then took the sounds that he had recorded and made a tape collage which, for him, arrived at that particular, essential quality of each season. This recording is the complete, unedited premiere performance that took place on Feb. 26 1983 at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. The booklet contains examples of the scores as well as excerpts from Goldstein's journals from 1977-1982.

1999 release. "Kilter is significant as a title because it displays Mary Ellen's habit of insisting we remember what, if left to ourselves, we'd be quite happy to forget. She's moved on, compelled like the rest of us to negotiate a strange, often lovely land, in an oddly menacing time. What she writes are signposts in that land, or lanterns which led the way home one night" --Bill Morelock, NPR. "In 'Parterre' transformation works as an almost psychedelic fantasy. Childs juggles a kaleidoscopic assortment of musical colors that are presented as layer upon layer of energized pulsations. These colors later develop and mutate with a wonderfully rich and warm sense of expansion. Childs creates a world where we feel anything could happen -- a truly universal world that's primordial in its understanding of humanity. In the work of Minneapolis composer Mary Ellen Childs, transformation is used to guide carefully and interpret the combined emotional and intellectual experience" --Bunita Marcus, Elle. "An enveloping and entrancing audio quilt composed of organic reeds, sylvan accordion, timepiece xylophone, seductive polyrhythms, and somewhat histrionic wordless vocals. 'Parterre' is an altogether surprising, accomplished, beautiful work that creates its own little universe" --Tom Surowicz, Twin Cities Reader. Performed by Guy Klucevsek (accordion), the SoHo Quartet (Mary Rowell, Mark Feldman, Lois Martin, Erik Friedlander), Relâche (clarinets, saxophones, bassoon, accordion, voice, perc.), Anthony de Mare (piano), Kathy Suprov (soprano), Dora Ohrenstein (soprano), Phillip Bush (piano).